Amid the Wrack by Isilme_among_the_stars  

Mists rise from grey waters in the chill morn, wreathing us in cloud, and isn’t that fitting when family has ever been a shifting, hazy thing, never solid enough to grasp at nor understand? Vingilot, for all its hallowed shine, is still the thing of rope and timber that Elros and I remember it to be, and the boards feel strangely familiar beneath my bared feet. As we lean against the balustrade, I at the left hand of our sire and he the right, I am struck by how ordinary the scene appears.

This place was called Mithrim once, though now it is yet another stretch of sea on which the ship gently bobs, its waters made calm by mountains of the same name which rise tall above the waves. I wonder how long it will take before their peaks are overmastered.

“Your grandfather was raised beneath those hills,” Eärendil says, catching the line of my gaze.

The caves must be long flooded by now; a home for cold, scaly things where once Tuor’s blood rose hot within him. I know his story well, though as far-off legend, not in the fashion of lived-in anecdote one is supposed to learn at their grandfather’s knee. Eärendil is just as much a stranger, albeit one who shares my distaste for shoes, and Elros’s slightly dimpled chin.

“Did you find him?” Elros asks, wincing as he shifts his weight. His badly bruised ribs give him trouble, but Elros has never been able to still his body for long. Our father appears content enough at rest, so perhaps my brother’s restlessness is of our mother.

“No.”

Elros’s eyes drift to the watery horizon and he lifts a hand to shade them. “It may be he is out there, somewhere.”

“It has been many years, Elros…” He shares my pragmatism, then, our father.

I did not recognise him at first. Divested of silmaril and armour Eärendil seemed another weary adan, wandering late into the tent seeking ministration for some minor wound. Having exchanged my sword for sutures shortly after the dragon was cast down, and being wearied by long, bloody hours, I did not see much beyond ‘intact’ and therefore not urgent.

I barely afforded him a glance. “Can I help you?”

“I was told I would find you here,” he replied mildly.

“You’ll have to wait until I’ve finished patching up my brother, I’m afraid.”

How inauspicious, those first words spoken between us since I was a babbling toddler.

“Elrond.” Elros stilled me with a hand on my arm.

“This needs—”

“It can wait.”

Only then did I truly look, and there stood before me a man struck dumb, his pale blonde hair sweat-darkened almost to brown, scratches marring his fair face, and shining eyes teetering somewhere between apprehension and hope. And I understood, for had I not felt the same as in my mind I built the vision of some fantastical day when we might finally meet? Impossibly, that day had come.

“What is it like, beyond the doors of night?” Elros asks, because he is hopelessly taken by romantic notions of adventure, and because he circles, not quite ready to land, around a point that screams out in both of our minds: you left us.

“Cold,” Eärendil says honestly as he turns to smile at my brother. “And strange. There’s a whole panoply of worlds among Varda’s stars,” our father goes on, and as he gazes toward the heavens I think his heart enamoured with starscapes we will never see. “So much is yet to be discovered.”

It is abundantly plain from where Elros’s adventuresome spirit sprang.

I should be glad that my father found satisfaction in the task with which he was charged. I should be grateful his duty is not drudgery but joy. It was, after all, not of his choosing, and perhaps far from the future he once envisioned. I do not think him sorry to sail the oceans of the sky. The celestial void calls to him as the sea once did Tuor.

“You will leave us again, and soon.” It is a fact I state, but there is bitterness in it I cannot swallow down.

Gently his hand falls atop mine, beseeching for understanding. “I do not wish it. But I must.”

“You are bound,” Elros says. “We understand.” There is not a hint of resentment in his voice, and I wonder how he manages that, when inside my chest my heart is twisting.

“Why?” I ask plaintively and even I do not know what it is I wish to know, only that a great tide of hurt has risen up within me and I do not wish to feel it.

Why did it have to be you?

Why was the cost so steep?

Why were we made to pay it too?

I may as well ask why the sky is blue.

“Because we hoped,” Eärendil says and it is with the strangest mingling of despondency and defiance I have yet seen. “How sweet it was to hold you both when you were born, two vigorous babes with not a care beyond a full belly and a warm embrace in which to rest. I soon came to realise that whether we continued to hide, or stood and fought, sooner or later I would likely watch you die. It was only a matter of time before Sirion fell at some black hand or other. Yet there was a chance, just one slim chance, that I could cheat that darkness before it swallowed all I loved. How could I not take it?”

It is odd the things one can recall, when the memory of them is stored not in the mind, but flesh and bone. It is not the first time Eärendil has brushed his fingertips along my jawline, from earlobe to chin, and the familiarity of that touch, laying long dormant beneath my skin, has me turning my cheek into his hand.

“We have some time,” he says. “I have made it known your help is wanted repairing my ship.”

“That is neither within our skillset…” begins Elros.

“…nor a particularly rational choice given Elros’s injuries,” I finish.

“The longing is rather transparent, is it not? Truthfully I could manage most of the work alone. However,” Eärendil says with a twinkle in his eye, “I find between the casting down of Ancalagon, and our kindred’s general eagerness to see the star of hope in flight once more, no one is particularly inclined to challenge me.”

He tries. Oh stars, does he try! How can I baulk at such a gift? And yet, had we all the ages of the world, or could we tarry for lifetimes within the scant days that have been granted, not even then could they undo the decades taken. In the quiet fog of half-lifted sleep it is still the echoes of another man I hear calling, asking why I am still abed, and the shape of comfort was not Eärendil’s touch, but dark curls wound round my finger as I sat, warm and safe in an usurper’s welcoming lap. This is what the sea took from me when it bore my father away in his argent-bright ship, and what it offers back now, cast up by currents belated and changed. Will Eärendil’s ever be the voice that registers in my ears as father? Will his comfort ever feel as natural as Maglor’s? His company as easy as my brother’s?

I cannot help but dread the proximity we are invited to share, almost as much as I crave it.

Out on the new-made seas gannets dive, plummeting like arrows fired deep beneath the waves intent on filling their gullets with shoaling fish. There is no ambivalence to their feasting, no hesitation before a launch at breakneck pace and a heady breach raising foamy splash. I am not as they, but I too shall take what I am given, and comb the wrack line for treasures cast away by the whims of the tides.

“Point me toward the tools,” I say. “I can learn.”

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